5 Things Your Small Business Should Automate in 2021

Automation is well and truly here, and if your business is not yet embracing it, you could be put at a distinct disadvantage. Automating various tasks in your small business allows you to take back your time, focus on bigger important tasks, rather than small necessary ones, and increase efficiency across the board. When done right, it can also boost customer service and save your company money.

Sound good? Want to start automating your business but don’t know where to begin? Here are some of the best things to automate in 2021:

1. Customer service

Yes, it is possible to largely automate the customer service experience thanks to the availability of excellent customer management software packages. For example,  using AI to answer some of the most commonly asked questions your business receives will enable you to answer your customers’ questions faster and more accurately, saving live chat and other manned customer service channels for those people who really need it.

2. Delivery

The delivery process can largely be automated these days too. So, if you sell physical products, you may want to look at things like smart lockers that enable contactless order pickup. Right now, reducing contact is important for all of our health and safety, but more than that, it enables you to deliver your goods more efficiently, and your customers to receive them with less hassle, which means no more missed packages, so everyone wins.

3. Marketing

You might think that marketing is one thing you absolutely cannot automate, but that is not the case. Marketing automation is a thing, and although you may not want to rely on it entirely, you should use it to help make the process of running several digital campaigns a lot more efficient. You’ll be able to schedule posts ahead of time across various platforms, create templates for email marketing campaigns and capture those leads with far less effort if you use some of the many marketing automation solutions available.

4. Invoicing

It’s a no-brainer to automate your invoicing process because, really, it’s one of the easiest things you can do in terms of automation. There are various apps and software packages that will keep track of any work you do and send an invoice to the client at a time scheduled by you, or on a rolling basis depending on what you require. Use them and you will free up bags of time that you can use to improve your business instead of working on this tedious, but necessary task.

5. Hiring

Again, you might not think that it is possible to automate the hiring process, but to some extent, you can. For example, you can use document scanning software to check for relevant keywords and qualifications, and you can use hiring automation software to post job vacancy ads on various platforms. This will help you to spend a bit less time on the process. Although, obviously, you will still need to conduct interviews and stuff in the flesh.